Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  THIS BOOK is dedicated to everybody who has touched my life, given me encouragement, and believed in me in the course of my writing. The list is nearly as long as the damned book, so I’ll try to name the heavy hitters first.

  Mate, Big T, Chicken, Cave Troll, and Ladybug—you are the heart of my Joy and I would not be able to live in Honor and Compassion without the example you set for me and the example I strive to set in order to be worthy. I love you all with all my heart.

  Mommy and Auntie Monica—you guys really believe in me. Every time you tell me this, I am grateful beyond words, and with every word I write, I try not to let you down.

  Daddy and Janis—you’ve read every one of my books, and you actually like them. Thank you—I hope I make you proud.

  My e-buddies—some of you guys will get hit in the acknowledgments too—consider it more bang for your buck in the “tolerance of Amy’s neuroses” department: Roxie, Littlewitch, Needletart, Eric, Shelley, Julie, Michelle, Lore, Jennie, Galad, Tinkingbell, and Archer—thank you. I’m the most annoyingly insecure person I know, and you guys are always there to say, “No, really—you don’t suck!” And you say it consistently and you say it sincerely and someday I’ll believe it and in the meantime, I cannot thank you enough.

  Acknowledgments

  OI! THIS one was long and hard and difficult and I must give some props to the people who helped me out with it:

  Roxie, Eric, Bonnie, Ceri, and Michelle—these guys are my editors. They read and nitpicked and asked me questions and three of them told me under no uncertain terms that Yarri must not die. One of them told me that maybe she should—and then didn’t sneak into my house and smother me in my sleep when I completely ignored him in spite of all his thoughtful work. Bonnie edited the manuscript twice. Both times it got better. All of you—you make me a better writer and you keep me grounded, and even if I don’t do what you say, I’d be a fool to ignore what you say. The mistakes are all mine, and if I ignored your advice it was at my own peril. (After all, I’m the dumbass who walked off the cliff when you all were screaming, “Oh for Triane’s sake, there’s a damned cliff over there!” Right?)

  I’d also like to thank the amazon.com people—PNR forum and KTT folks—you all are my electronic coffee-klatch, and I have learned so much from all of you. Thanks for listening when I rant and giving my books a chance and basically having an open mind to someone who put her own ass on the line and prayed really hard that her work didn’t suck. Thanks for telling me that mostly, it doesn’t!

  Prologue: Goddess Stories

  THE HEALER sat in the waning twilit hours of the Beltane Faire and watched the couples dancing in front of the bonfire in preparation for the wilding. His wife—short, plump, and sturdy—came and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, touching her cheek to his.

  “They’re all waiting,” she told him, not wanting to look into his eyes. The pain was there, all of it, as fresh as it must have been thirty years before, when he’d first ridden off to the east and left her. It was just as bad now, just as bloody as it had been, when they’d ridden back to town nearly a year later.

  Goddess, how Yarri hated Beltane.

  Once upon a time, it had been her favorite holiday. When she and Torrant had come to Eiran, it had been a symbol of rebirth and spring, beauty and family.

  But that had been before he’d left her to save the world. That had been before his heart had been ripped out, and she, Aldam, and Aylan had barely been able to put it back together. That had been before she’d had to watch him, for nigh on thirty years, resurrect this pain for their town and their family, make it fresh and red all over again.

  “Beloved?” she said, and he turned toward her, the softness on his face for her and her alone. Then he came to himself, remembering what he had to do. He wiped his mouth with his hand and stood, his hazel eyes assuming that artificial brightness she always associated with this moment, on this evening.

  “You don’t have to do it again this year,” she said, taking his hand. He touched her cheek and smiled again, this one almost reaching his eyes.

  “Of course I do! It’s important. Besides, the little ones expect it.”

  “The little ones just want a story and a song from their Pa-pa,” she snapped with bitterness that surprised them both. “This hurts you!”

  “It should hurt me.” He ran a hand through his short hair, the salting of gray obscuring but not hiding the white crest at his temple. He’d wondered aloud lately, after watching himself age easily through the years, if he would have to dye his hair brown in order to show that mark of magic like the badge of honor it was. This morning he’d stated rather firmly that never having to hide the white streak again would be enough.

  “That pain bought something important,” he continued when she looked away and refused to answer.

  “Well, then.” She turned away sharply, angry with him for doing this to himself. Hadn’t he given enough?

  “Hey!” He caught up to her and took her hand. “You knew this would hurt us when we started.”

  Yarri eyed him sourly. “It’s one thing when we were young,” she said at last, “but shouldn’t there be an age when you get to stop ripping your own entrails out for the greater good?”

  He winced. “Appropriate, beloved,” he said with a grim smile, but she couldn’t even return that.

  “This hurts you.” It was stated baldly, without flinching. Yarri was as she always had been—the years had not softened her, but they had given her a little grace. “It hurts me to see you hurt,” she added softly.

  “I’m fine.”

  She shook her head adamantly, her long, silvering braid rippling past her wide hips. Once it had grown back, neither of them had ever wanted to cut it again.

  “Every year you say that, and every year there are nightmares. We’ve done this for thirty years—you know that, right? For thirty years you tell this story, and every year the two of you spend a week sharing a bed back to back, swords in hands, whimpering if you actually do close your eyes.”

  He looked away. Starren and Yarri had known, from the first night of their return, that Torrant and Aylan would never be able to shake some memories of that terrible time. For the most part, neither of them minded overmuch, but Torrant and Aylan were honorable men. Their wives didn’t give a flying bucket of pigshite about the niceties of fidelity, as long as their beloveds could rise from the darkness and embrace them in the light, but that need for each other when they were frightened or reminded of the darkness never faded. Sometimes honor flinched, and honorable men had to live with that.

  Yarri was not concerned with honor. She had learned long ago that she would take her beloved living, breathing, and struggling with his conscience over still and dead on any day.

  “I could give a shite if you and Aylan bugger each other until your hearts pop,” she said, shifting in impatience when Torrant winced. “Look, I’ll always be here to pick up the pieces, because I truly don’t care—I never have. But I can’t watch your heart break, not one more time, not again. Ellyot’s youngest isn’t feeling well….”

  “All that sugar.” He smiled, and she rolled her eyes in agreement. For a moment they were a perfect burst of harmony, a shared expression of a lifetime of living to be the other’s heartbeat.

  “And Bitsy’s baby is teething. I’ll take them to the house while you do this. I’ve heard it before.” Her mouth, which was usually shaped like a plump and pleasant little bow, was pinched together, almost invisible in her irritation.

  Still, he thought he’d try one more time. “The song changes every year,” he said lightly, and her look grew even darker.

  “No it doesn’t!” she hissed. “It never changes. ‘Oueant’s Son,’ ‘Dueant’s Son,’ ‘Triane’s Son’—none of it matters. What matters is that it was real and that we lived and that you and Aylan and Aldam and….” Her voice faltered. Not even she could mention those other names, the names of their honored dead, on a breath of ire. “All of us,” she f
inished lamely. “All of us did this.” Yarri sighed and eyed their five children unhappily. They were waiting gravely, their families and friends grouped around them. Their father was going to play. Yarri couldn’t, not even for the love she bore her husband, figure out how to tell him how much the aftermath of this story hurt him.

  “What matters,” she finally said, “is that we shed blood, not a little of it your own, to make this world a better place, and that you shed more of it every year when you go out and tell this story, and I’m sick of it!”

  He smiled, the grooves around his mouth deepening, his dimple popping, and his lip curling up on one side. It was an absolutely lethal smile, and it had taken him a while to learn its power, but many women still fantasized about the lead healer of Eiran.

  He had only ever cared about two.

  “Thirty years, my heart’s peace, that we’ve been telling this story, and you still don’t understand why it’s important that I tell it?”

  She looked away, feeling childish. She had never been poised, never been quiet and docile, and she assumed that was one of the qualities he loved her for—or in spite of. She hated feeling petulant, spoiled, and unkind.

  “You tell me, then!” she snapped, unhappy with both of them. She should drop it. She should just drop it. She should be a good wife and listen to his story, let him spend his week sleeping in Aylan’s bed, and accept that he loved her without question.

  “It needs to be remembered,” Torrant said firmly, holding her shoulders. “That’s what’s important. We need to make sure that no one ever needs to go out and live this story again.” His voice hardened, and his eyes flashed a glacial blue, frigid and sharp, at odds with the warmth he practically radiated.

  “Right,” she replied, her brown eyes wide. She rarely saw that color anymore. She might have lost her hard-won maturity in an effort to protect her husband, but she was not a fool. “The little ones will be fine. I’ll stay and listen.”

  Very carefully, as though not to puncture her delicate bubble of acquiescence, he leaned forward and touched her forehead with his own. He cupped his hand between their chests as though there was something precious, something lovely and sweet and fragile, housed in the space between their heartbeats. Her mouth softened, and her tanned, freckled, barely wrinkled face creased into a tender smile as she cupped her hands over his.

  This. This lovely warmth between them—this had never changed, and it could not be killed.

  His gorgeous, gods-beloved smile came back, and he swung around to greet the family, all of them, gathered around the Moons’ traditional picnic table. He had to wade his way through grandchildren in order to perch on the top of the table, after shooing a couple of the smaller ones off his lap.

  AYLAN DID his own wading and handed his oldest friend his lute. Torrant took it gratefully. It was old as well—it had belonged to Lane before him—and the wood was mellow and sweet with age and oil, years of melancholic songs dancing across its strings.

  “Thank you, Aylan.” For the first time a hint of uncertainty crossed Torrant’s face. “You’re staying, right?” There had been a few years after Starry had come of age when the two of them had tried to live without each other the week after Beltane, and Aylan had been unable to stay and listen. The absence had hurt them. It had left them shredded and infected, and one Solstice wilding, Starren and Yarri had conspired for the two of them to meet. Hadn’t they all fought for the right to wild and love, to make love and make family as they saw fit, and not the world at large?

  “Of course I’m staying,” Aylan replied, with a killer smile of his own. Aylan’s smile had improved with time; the bitterness that possessed it in his youth was completely gone now. “If I’m not here, you don’t tell it right.”

  “Ha!” Torrant guffawed, secure now that Aylan would be there to see him through this. “If you’re not here, no one whines when the son of Oueant gets his due!”

  Aylan’s look of disgust was enough to pull the last of the tears from Torrant’s heart, and he smiled at his children for their approval. The oldest two, the twin boys, of all the family needed this song, he thought achingly. So much of who they were was wrapped up in who had come before.

  Lane hobbled up across the green, much of his weight on the pair of canes in his hands. He had been seated with the other elders, watching the sunset, but he too was faithful to the story as it was told at Beltane. Torrant’s eldest, Ellyot, ran up with a stool for his great-uncle Lane, and Lane sank onto it gratefully.

  “Have you started yet, boyo?” he asked. His voice had aged, and his beard was long and full and white now, but his eyes still twinkled their merry blue, nearly as sharp in what they saw today as they had been in Torrant’s youth.

  “Not yet, Uncle Lane. You know we can’t tell the story without you.” Torrant tuned a couple of strings and played a chord that proved his ear was still sound. Almost to himself, he said, “I wish Aunt Bethen was here.”

  “Oh, she is, but she’s getting impatient. Now start!”

  The rest of the family laughed, and Aylan’s youngest, a scant and scandalous six years old, piped up, “You’re going to tell the story of the Sons of the Three Moons, right, Uncle Torrant?” The little boy’s hand was firmly entrenched in the hand of Ellyot’s youngest, as they had been since the little girl was born. The sight of the two of them, so easily moon-destined, so beautifully meant, made Torrant’s heart constrict with pain and joy.

  “Absolutely, Djali,” he replied. “Are we all ready? Do we all remember how it starts?”

  His five children started the first verse, their voices falling in and out of harmony, but still strong. When they were done singing, he began the story itself, the words changing as details sharpened and faded with the passage of years, but always, always, starting with the same image.

  “A ruthless ruler, mad and powerful, had been persecuting Triane’s children for many years. One day, Triane’s Son and his best friend, the son of Oueant, the moon of Honor, rode into the cursed city to stop him.

  “They bore between the two of them a terrible secret….”

  Part X—The Deceiving Moon

  And You Are?

  THEY WOULD not have known who he was when he entered the gates of Dueance, trying hard not to gag at the stench of the crucified bodies hanging over the archway. They would not have known who he was as he made his way through the neatly bricked streets of the city’s main common area and into the square where the consort’s palace, the Hall of Regents, and the regents’ apartments all faced each other, with the entrance to the square serving as the fourth wall.

  After he presented his letters of introduction to the concierge at the regents’ dormitories, asking politely for a ground-floor room with a window and a water closet, odds were good that his name got out. It certainly received a satisfying reaction from the self-important little man who waxed lyrical about the library on the top floor of the apartment building, talking at length about how it was the finest collection of law books and financial tracts in the three lands.

  “And poetry, now that you’ve burnt down Triannon,” he said with no dryness and a bitter lack of irony.

  The concierge turned red, looked at the name on the letters of introduction, and promptly tried to choke on his tongue.

  The young man across from him smiled with only the faintest lifting of his eyebrows. “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m….” The small old man looked up at the strapping broad chest of the young man and swallowed at that level, expectant gaze. Years of training kicked in, years during which he’d observed the foibles of the young, the moneyed, and the feckless and not only didn’t raise an eyebrow but didn’t let an indiscretion pass his lips in the company of anyone but his bored wife. “No problem at all.” He smiled blandly, and the young man indicated the concierge should lead the way to his apartment with a raised eyebrow over shockingly clear hazel eyes.

  “I thought not.” They proceeded to a sumptuous apartment, full of heavy bur
gundy velvet draperies and a truly hedonistic sateen couch, cover done in jewel-colored embroidery. The bedroom was as large as the sitting room and kitchenette put together, and the bed was big enough to house five, with a sin-dark mahogany four-posted frame and a matching wardrobe as big as the ferry to Otham. There was a small patio outside the bedroom and a washroom annexed to the bedroom, with a window overlooking the marble-walled shower and toilet. There was also a promise of maid service and discreet laundry service, as long as he put what needed to be washed and pressed in the offered hamper.

  “There’s a canteen in the west wing corner,” the concierge offered with a smile, “so there should be no problem if you get caught without stocks during curfew. They offer all three meals, if you like, but most of the young regents take their breakfast in the marketplace.”

  The man looked at Torrant with a smile, hoping for some response to the amenities, but he got a rather dazed look in return. Had the concierge known, his shocking new tenant was both humbled and disgusted by the excess.

  The new regent, in fact, yearned for a simple house of battered board walls and a thick slab of a kitchen table instead, with the sound of family inside and the roar of the sea without. He would have settled for a country surgery, with newly built bedrooms, a tiny water closet with a wooden seat on the commode, and the smell of dust and cedars in the hot, dry summers. He would have wept for the loft in a horse stable, with a quilt on the straw and a picnic of bread and apples at the ready.

  But wanting was easy, and doing was hard. What the young man actually did was park his duffel next to the bed and wait for the concierge’s attention.

  “Are the regents in session now?” he asked, hoping all his rehearsing with Aylan made that question come out casually.